Keynote Address I: Blueprints for a Flash-Transformed Data Center: Challenges and Opportunities for System Software

We begin with an examination of the technical value propositions of flash memory in the data center from the perspective of the major workload types in the data tier. We survey recent work in exposing and exploiting flash memory technology’s key capabilities through software in the control and data planes, and roadmap the major integrations needed in order to deliver on the promised value propositions.

The conversation will then shift to creating blueprints for successful deployment of flash technology at scale. The blueprints are categorized by market segments and scale. They guide us in prioritizing OS research for supporting the most suitable attach points and form factors, interfaces and protocols, standards and open source, benchmarks and workloads.

The final remarks will address the exploration-convergence dilemma before us, forcing us to choose: between creative application and standardization; between device-level and service-level offerings; between flash as memory and flash as disk; and between control-plane and data-plane value propositions. It is argued that these are often false choices, that a "both…and" approach will prove superior to an "either…or" approach in order to justify the level of economic investment needed for realizing our vision of an all-flash data center.

Dr. Pankaj Mehra is currently SanDisk Senior Fellow. He was SVP & CTO at enterprise flash technology pioneer Fusion-io and before that at Whodini, an e-mail analytics company he founded. Appointed a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard in 2004 for his groundbreaking work on persistent memory, Pankaj went on to found HP Labs Russia where he was Chief Scientist until 2010, and where he incubated Taxonom.com, a cloud service for creating ontologies from queries, document collections, and examples. He previously served on the faculty of IIT, Delhi and UC Santa Cruz. Pankaj’s 48 filed patents, 29 papers, and 3 books cover a range of topics in scalable intelligent systems, and his engineered systems have held TPC-C and Terabyte Sort performance records and won recognition from NASA and Sandia National Labs. Pankaj volunteers at MMDS Foundation as their industry liaison chair, and previously served on the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing and Transactions on Computers, and on numerous program committees ranging from SuperComputing to International Semantic Web Conference.